Tag Archives: racism

Fellow Australian Citizens

By Posted in First Australians, Life, Opinion, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 3 Comments

My Fellow Australian Citizen dismounts from his bicycle at the intersection. Here, where the bike lane ends, trams, cars and pedestrians converge. Some turn at this intersection, others race through at speed. It’s a tricky crossing, the roadway here unsafe for a cyclist.

My fellow Australian Citizen wheels his bike carefully along the footpath. He finds himself following close behind a Fellow Australian Citizen (FAC) who. oblivious of man and bicycle, is engrossed in her phone conversation. FAC, male, decides to alert her to his presence: Pardon me, he says. FAC, female, looks up, sees her fellow citizen, looks angry.FAC, male, feels he’s interrupted the other’s conversation. He apologises: Excuse me, he says, I am sorry. FAC, female, speaks. He thinks he hears, You don’t belong here.

Does she mean, you and your cycle don’t belong on the footpath? Pardon me? – he asks.

YOU. DON’T. BELONG. HERE.
FAC, male, is no longer in doubt.
I ask FAC, male, How did you feel, once you understood her meaning?Water off a duck’s back. I tell FAC, male, I feel sick. Sick and sad. Like I did when they decided Adam Goodes didn’t belong. FAC, male, explains: Sticks and stones. Back in Rwanda one half of our population decided the other half didn’t belong. They equipped themselves with machetes. I survived and I ran. My family went into hiding. To this day they hide in a safe house. They’re still after me. I ran to Australia and Australia gave me asylum. I stayed, I worked, I studied. I graduated and I became a citizen.
A hopeful thought: I ask, What did she look like, your Fellow Australian Citizen? Ordinary. Nothing remarkable. I persist: Describe her for me.FAC, male, is puzzled: She looked like anyone else: mid-forties, perhaps. Light brown hair, slim, medium height. (What I want to know, what I’m hoping to hear, is she’s Aboriginal. If she were indigenous she’d be within her rights. Rude perhaps, but within her rights, certainly.) I mean what was her race?Oh. She was caucasian.


Fellow Australian Citizens have rallied in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, in a time of danger, risking greatly, searching, trying to find a way of showing how black lives matter in this country too.In this country citizens are feeling conscious that we might not belong here, not by ancient right. We arrived here in the last century, or two or three. We are new here.We lack the legitimacy of antiquity.
The First Australians might reasonably challenge us. They might say, you don’t belong here. But they don’t say that. Instead they say, let’s share country.
I’ve heard them, I’ve heard it everywhere that I’ve travelled to work – in the Pilbara, in the Kimberley, in the Ngaaanyatjarrah lands, in the Adnymathanha lands, in my home country of the Wiradjuri, in Bigambul country, in the country of the Darug, the Yamaji, the Arrernte, the Warlpiri, the Bininj, the Nangiomeri, Marimandinji, Marithiel, Maringar, Mulluk Mulluk.
These dark times are also times of hope. Times of searching of a nation’s soul.But at that crossing, at that intersection where Fellow Australian Citizens meet, hope slackens. Fear, feeding on a deep ignorance of the nature of an immigrant nation, flickers into hate. Elsewhere in this country, fear flickers into hate against Chinese Australians. And there’s always the Jews to hate too.

Which Epidemic?

By Posted in Life, Medical, Opinion, rascism Tagged , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Here are some facts about Australia’s epidemic.
In 2019, Australia had 300,00 proven cases of influenza. The true number of cases was probably in excess of 900,000. (The numbers of cases exceeds the number of tests, because most doctors recognised the flu without sending off swabs for laboratory confirmation. Further, not all flu sufferers saw a doctor.)
Since the start of 2020, there have been 12,713 PROVEN cases of influenza in Australia.

8000 Australians died of influenza in 2019.

In the course of the Vietnam War we lost 521 soldiers killed.
Those are the facts of our true epidemic. In 2019 despite the epidemic, despite the death toll, you could buy toilet paper, you could buy pasta and rice.In 2019 no-one panicked.In 2019 no-one thought of boycotting Chinese restaurants.
In 2019 we had no panic and we had no recession.This year we have a limited outbreak of a viral infection which is less contagious than influenza. Xenophobia comes into full flower.In our formerly happy country we now have an outbreak of racism. Chinese restaurants stand empty.
The swastika flies in Wagga.

Ogholotse and Adam

By Posted in Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This blog has seen me leap into print recently in a familiar posture of righteous urging on the subjects of the public humiliation of a footballer and the plight of a lady with a disability. Brace yourself for more righteousness.

I wrote of my schoolmate, Hilary, a social worker and ceramicist – did I mention Hilary’s ceramics? – who works from home, counseling the lost and confused, supervising tribes of fellow therapists, contributing to the health of persons and, through her taxpaying, to the health of the economy. Hilary is an agent for good. She is not a leaner. Financially stringent governments should love Hilaries.

This particular Hilary has a couple of disabilities, however: she is not young and she has a touch of quadriplegia. She needs carers around the clock. She pays these persons from her earnings and they in turn pay taxes. No leaners here.

One of Hilary’s two carers, Ilaisaane – called Saane – is not a citizen of this country. A skilled person (she’s a State Enrolled Nurse), Saane comes from Tonga. She’s allowed to stay here as the spouse of another person, who holds a skilled immigrant visa. That person, Ogholotse, is highly skilled. A graduate of Melbourne’s esteemed RMIT University, OG as he’s called, holds both Bachelor and Masters degrees in multimedia. (As an unimaginative unimedium person I am bemused that such a skill might exist.) However, exist it does and an employer exists who needed someone with Ogholotse’s skill. So the someone employed him, he came into the country, he worked and he paid his taxes. Another non-leaner. Everyone is happy. Ilaisaane cares expertly, intimately, tenderly for Hilary in a relationship rich in mutual respect.

Everyone’s a winner.

So far so good. But hard times struck the employer and OG was let go. He has sought alternative employment in his sanctioned area of skill, but he has not found it.

Now Australia will let OG go and with him Immigration rules we must let Ilaisaane go. Being near-indispensible, once Ilaisaane goes, Hilary just might go too: Hilary’s going would be into institutional care, into a life of dependency, of expensive involuntary leaning.

Everyone loses.

There’s a simple solution: OG needs to find a job. RMIT graduates are the most work-ready, highly employable skilled persons in industry. Employers love RMIT graduates, seeking them out and hiring them even in times of deep economic recession. At present we don’t have a recession. Skilled jobs exist. Odd that Ogholotse doesn’t have one. He’s strong and healthy and clever, he’s experienced, willing and personable. And as you’ll see from the photo, he enjoys that unfair advantage in job-seeking of being good looking.

  
What can be his problem? Sure, he’s black. That couldn’t be his problem, surely. Not here, not in Australia. We aren’t racists. Ask Adam Goodes.
Postcript:

If you happen to be or to know a colour blind employer who needs a person skilled in multimedia, please write urgently to Hilary at quincetree@gmail.com. Time is very short.
Previous post on Hilary’s story http://wp.me/p2QU0B-Mg

Two Flies on a Wall and Darky Harris

By Posted in First Australians, Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

fliesWhen I was a boy I came across cultural truisms like, “Aussies will bet on anything; they’ll bet on two flies walking up a wall.” What I heard was something to celebrate, a playfulness in the Australian spirit. When I inherited from a great uncle a curious little plank with two identical circular depressions, someone had to explain this relic of “two-up”, a national pastime. It spoke to me of the irrepressible Aussies of  “Songs of a Sentimental Bloke”. As a more than commonly sentimental bloke myself, I was not disposed to judge or diagnose any malady.

In 1972 I met Darkie Harris. I was the new GP in an ethnically homogenous semi-rural community, an oddity in a skullcap. Somehow the community embraced and included me while excluding the pig-raising Maltese and my only co-religionists ‘the Jews on the hill’.
Darkie Harris differed from everyone and in ways solely his own. Unprepossessing, short, stocky, swarthy, with a face marked by scars and improved by large purpling lips and a vocal tone that ranged from a growl to a bark, he looked older than his fifty-four years and fiercer than anyone so old (I was then exactly half his age) had a right to look.
Darkie distinguished himself by a sort of verbal pugilism. By word and facial expression, and yes, by facial complexion, Darkie dared everyone he encountered to fight him.

What was it that Darkie wanted to fight against? One thing, one thing only. Racism: I don’t care if you’re a chinaman or an abo or a white man. If I cut you, you’re blood’s the same colour as mine.* Darkie was the only person in the town who saw this Jewcomer doctor as undifferent. In equal parts alarmed and charmed, I found I liked him. To most in town I seemed exotic, to some a too shiny exception (‘you’re not like the others’), to some an emblem of a nobility I never earned.

Darkie was retired by the time I met him. He’d take up his position on a bench outside the Chinese café and the fish and chip shop run by a pair of Maltese brothers. He’d sit and glower, softening into a winning chivalry towards women (a sweep of the hat, a flash of gaptoothed smile, “Good morning, Ladies”) and to engage toddlers in amiable conversation while uncertain mothers tried to hide their nervousness and drag their children away.
Darkie sat on his bench and kept vigil. He was waiting for the unguarded comment, any reference he could take exception to, any sneer at the immigrants he championed.
Young hoons and would-be thugs about town learned to shy away from Darkie. As he informed me on a number of occasions, I’d sooner have a fight than a feed. Darkie was referring to his younger self in the Depression days when he was a runner for an illegal bookie, a risky position in a volatile industry. But in 1972 his interlocutor would take Darkie at his word as he’d rise and stride, frothing, barking menacingly to confront the casual bigot.

Darkie never gambled. Those were not the risks he’d take. He described his working life as an honest buccaneer. He served his boss – some degree of criminal – honourably. He’d take the blows and deliver his own and he’d return home and hand his earnings to Joyce, his leathery wife, who subsisted in a cloud of tobacco. Before Joyce Darkie would humble himself, confess his escapades and worship.

The stories of Darkie and flies on a wall and two-up created the sketchy image I had of gambling in Australia. We must have had gambling addiction but I never knowingly met one. I knew dimly of the ancient rabbinic edict that disqualified a gambler as a witness in court proceedings because an addict could neither trust himself or be trusted by others.

In 1976 I went for an early morning run in Launceston, pausing to poke a curious nose into the local casino, a gruesome cellar where women in curlers and moccasins sat mechanically before fruit machines from six in the morning.
Shaken, I ran away.
For some years in the late nineties my younger daughter, a psychologist, worked as a therapist at Gambler’s Help. Her stories of human wreckage at our dinner table opened my eyes. In 2000 I met Alan, a shining youth who became my patient. He starred at hockey, graduated from his elite school, studied business, was recruited by a leading financial institution that trained him as a currency dealer. Two years ago Alan married his golden girl Helen, a primary teacher. They bought a house together in the regional city were she grew up. Neither Alan nor Helen yet realised the bank Alan worked for had trained him as one of their corps of gamblers.
A year ago doctors in the city’s ICU worked on Alan through a Saturday night and all the next day and night. At 27 years of age, Alan’s life seemed at its end, his blood pressure unrecordable, his breathing and heartbeat negligible. It must have been his hockey that saved Alan, his underlying fitness, that brought him back from where his overdose had taken him. After gambling away the contents of the joint bank account, Alan punted on the marital home and lost it. On a weekend when Helen was out of town for a friend’s hen’s night, Alan wrote a note and swallowed the tablets that were to end his self-loathing and his shame. Only Helen’s dog, locked out of the house all Friday night and Saturday, raised the ire of neighbours with her barking.

The marriage died and was buried in a divorce. In the settlement there was little to apportion: Helen took her dog, Alan his shame. His need, his comfort, his fateful hoping – I mean his urge to gamble – survives. It is a daily battle which Alan does not always win.

I turn on the TV to watch sport. Sport still has the power to inspire me, to express nobility, to create wonder, to delight, to unite and uplift. Before and after and between plays, the gambling industry shouts its messages of slim hope, seducing, reducing the game to mere exchange. It is not possible for a child to watch sport on TV without seeing gambling ads. I turn off and prowl my bitter old mind and think of Alan.

In these wrinkled years the past glows, the present moulders, the future threatens. We need someone to blame. That’s why we elect governments – there are some things you just can’t blame on your wife. In the matter of our gambling pandemic I blame governments. Governments bankrupt of funds fall hard for the revenue that streams from gambling. Soon the treasury is addicted to gambling. A few budgets later, we have a government bankrupt of judgement and ultimately of morality. In their lonely amorality, our representatives fall into bad company, the Gambling Lobby. Governments collude with the industry to prevent and foil the simplest attempts to ameliorate our national malaise.

Over two decades I have witnessed the card games in remote Aboriginal communities. Large numbers, women usually outnumbering men, sit on the ground beneath huge trees and gamble from first light to nightfall. Darkness falls and the players shift to the bitumen and sit on the roadway and play through the night.
In Arnhem Land once a nurse and I battled through a long day to save an underweight, undersized infant with life-threatening pneumonia, the child starved because his mother had no money for food. After the necessities – I mean cigarettes and Coca Cola – the young mother consumed the family income at the card games.

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The Five Fifty Four

By Posted in Travel Tagged , 12 Comments

5.52pm. We pour into the train at Flinders Street, a large field competing for seats. The train is crowded. At 5.54, right on time, the train lurches into motion. Strap hangers brace themselves. Those of us who are seated sink inward into passivity. It is the end of the day.

5.56pm. Richmond Station. Dozens leave our compartment, scores replace them. The carriage is fuller than before. A forest of people grows up around and before me.

A snarl, a growl. It comes from somewhere near the front.

Faces lift from phones and the throwaway gossip paper: What was that? Who was that? Who are you looking at?

The sound is a voice, a localised explosion of menace. Faces turn, necks crane, a space opens around the voice.

Fucking VC! Get back to fucking China!

The space around the sounds widens. I can see a man, Asian, not young, in an aisle seat. Next to him in the aisle stands a short stocky man, not Asian, who glowers at him. In the window seats sits another Caucasian. He shrinks towards the window, away from the protagonists at his side.

The train has started to move. South Yarra station is 100 seconds away. One hundred seconds in which two men play out their scene before an audience of around 100 witnesses.

Asian shit! What the fuck you doin’ in our country? Fuckin shit!

The view is clearer now. There is plenty of space around the men.

Shouter is about thirty, Asian man about sixty. His head is bowed, his thin grey hair hangs, a frayed curtain about his face. Inches distant, Shouter’s arms bulge from his short sleeves, his muscular face and his bullet head twitch. Spittle speeds the sibilants he screams into the older man’s face.

Why don’t you fuckin answer? Continue reading →